When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, it triggered a crisis at Google. Just three weeks after ChatGPT’s arrival, Google declared a company-wide “Code Red”, a report by New York Times said at that time, adding that the staff were instructed to set aside existing projects and redirect their energy toward fast-tracking new AI products and features. Perhaps the most significant sign of the crisis was the return of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In a recent interview, CEO Sundar Pichai recalled that as pressure built, Brin – who had been retired from daily operations for years – began showing up at the office again.
By early February 2023, Google had announced Bard, its answer to ChatGPT. However, Bard had not been built in a hurry, and had actually been in development for some time, Fast Company reported.
The reason it had not been released earlier came down to a concern that has haunted generative AI from the beginning: hallucination, which is a tendency of AI models to confidently produce false or misleading information. Google had held back precisely because of that risk, and Pichai described the decision as “bold but responsible”.
‘Bard underperformed’
Bard’s initial reception was lukewarm at best. Critics and users alike viewed it as a rushed, underwhelming response to the OpenAI’s ChatGPT. After a year of struggling to build meaningful brand recognition, Google made the decision to scrap the Bard name entirely, relaunching the chatbot as Gemini.
But while Bard was stumbling in public, something significant was happening behind the scenes. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had both stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the company years earlier, returned as active participants in the effort to accelerate Google’s AI development, the report said.
Brin, in particular, threw himself back into the work. He was involved in hiring decisions, code reviews and the granular technical details of model development. For a company’s workforce to see the person who built the whole thing roll up his sleeves and get back in the room — that, Pichai says, meant everything.
“Having the founder of the company sitting together with your engineers sweating out the details of the model — I can’t imagine a more motivating thing for people,” Pichai said. Brin even appeared in a launch video for “Antigravity” – an advanced AI-powered coding tool developed by Google based on Gemini 3.
